Revolutionizing music education.

First, my core student population is 8 years old and younger. I teach children starting at birth, although I believe strongly that rhythm development begins earlier—at least three, maybe four or five, months earlier. During this time, the aural experience repetition of diverse rhythmic and stylistic repertoire is key. There is no rhythm content that should be off-limits with the relatively rare exception being pieces that have no consistent beat or meter. I wouldn’t necessarily avoid Chopin being played rubato, but I wouldn’t encourage it either. Twentieth century works whose composers actively sought to avoid conventional rhythms and meters would be something I would discourage. Any piece with too much subjective of meter (experts could disagree and both be right) would also be discouraged.

On the other hand, the most complex content of some rhythm traditions, such as northern Indian tabla drumming, I believe would make for extraordinary acculturation. Rhythm repertoire represented in broad categories of traditional jazz, classical, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, Latin, African, African diaspora, and other styles should comprise the meat of a child’s listening vocabulary, though important potatoes of Rock and Roll should certainly be included. Styles such as Rap, Hip Hop, contemporary R&B, and more do certainly have value. Still, they do not, in my opinion, typically and consistently provide what is an adequate foundation for a child’s rhythm listening vocabulary. The rhythm content simply is not broad enough without the inclusion of my A-list genres. Please understand that I already stated they certainly have value. Perhaps these lower and higher limits are self-imposed due to the level of my personal rhythm aptitude. I won’t deny that cultural bias, too, might play a role. (I’ve opened up a Pandora’s Box.) There are good and band exceptions in every kind of music. I adhere to this as gospel. As Duke Ellington said, "There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind."

Regarding classroom teaching and rhythm learning, I always ask each child to perform (or just listen to) rhythm patterns individually that incorporate these beat functions in this hierarchical order:

A) macro/microbeats (starting at 9 months if they want to),

B) divisions (at 2 years old if they want to using ba-da-ba-da, not bah bah bah bah),

C) elongations (whenever they show me they are imitating if not audiating divisions, as early as 2)

D) pick-ups (whenever a few elongation patterns are imitated or audiated)

E) ties (whenever the above are being imitated consistently)

F) rests - the most difficult patterns. I will try these to find the most rhythmically inclined child, but I’d rather acculturate them, or have them imitate and audiate A-E above. Rest patterns are just silently audiated bits inside all the above patterns.

Rhythm performance alone is not as important as movement alone. Said another way, encouraging a child to move has more value than having them perform rhythm patterns, especially early in life. Large body movements incorporating flow and weight are crucial to a child’s rhythm development. Continuous fluid movement (or CFM) is a major player in what I model for children and parents. But, I do not model CFM exclusively. (I don’t subscribe completely to the common CFM vocabulary I’ve seen. It’s typically far too limited and dynamically flaccid. [Ouch!]) I concentrate on modeling three elements—flow, weight, and space— while keeping a greater emphasis on flow. I move as expressively and as dynamically as possible. I conduct using my entire body, never shying away from being Bernstein, Ozawa, or Ormandy with legs and a full stage, not just upper body on a small podium. Simple and solid macrobeat movements I model keep flowing, moving between beats. Stillness, though, can be a valuable preparation for the next beat if prepared with movement and a demonstrative breath. Coordinating macro and microbeats simultaneously in the body is as important as rhythm pattern performance. Both are crucial.

Rhythm performance combined with movement is that much better. It is content and context happening simultaneously in a physical, objective reality. Further, helping children to feel form while audiating rhythm and moving is the holy grail. I lead function-feeling activities for the purpose of pure acculturation whereas moving rhythmically while performing rhythms has a different purpose of furthering rhythm performance audiation. (For example, the A section of an ABA piece is accompanied by locomotor move and the B is not.) These activities give children the opportunity to acculturate to form, a sort of longitudinal rhythm.

[Ideas for expansion.] Beat keeping is best done with the tongue or mouth first.

So, say that I have had some children at the 99.99 percentile, (and I’ve had a few in my 30 years since BGE [Before the Gordon Era]) who can perform and create all of the above by the time they’re 6 or 7. I have never felt compelled to teach them the labels of the beat functions. I just didn’t use the terms divisions, elongations, ties, upbeats, and rests. There was no present need. It wasn’t going to help their audiation. Neither were there questions from the children or the sense of them missing something by not having the labels.

Unlike beat functions, the label of a tonal pattern as tonic or dominant is specific. Labeling a rhythm pattern as one with divisions is not specific enough. And what of patterns with many different beat functions? I don’t feel that we’re given them any more meaning to rhythm than by performing it accurately and expressively. That one pattern has macro, micro, and elongations and that another has micro, elongations and divisions does not give you but cursory information relative to the musical meaning of the rhythm pattern itself. Labeling a pattern doesn’t bring any more understanding to the rhythm pattern itself. On the other hand, tonic and dominant functions can be audiated. Divisions cannot (or may I don’t) until you make them specific by putting them into a rhythm pattern that includes divisions. . .or maybe also has macrobeats, or microbeats, or both, or rests, or ties, etc., included with the divisions. A pattern of only divisions is like a pattern of only macrobeats—that is, not useful except at the Theoretical Understanding level of Skill Learning Sequence.

These are my initial thoughts. This is a first draft with a few hours of editing. The writing is not the best. I hope it is clear.

11/02/2015

Can we notate in music a Stephane Grappelli solo accurately?( http://bit.ly/StephGrap ) The notes? Mostly. The rhythm? Partially. The style? Less likely. The tiny slides between notes, the rhythmic feel, and subtle expressive elements? Impossible. Absolutely impossible. The best anyone can do with notation would be to put something down that would remind the music reader of some of the basic elements mentioned above. All of he rest must come from audiation—the part that is in your head that cannot be well represented in notation: subtleties such as tonal nuances, phrasing, and most expressive elements. These would be just a few of the differences between your interpretation and mine, say, of a beautiful ballad. What you bring to the party—from all your past listening experiences that inform your choices—will be different from what I bring. Given this, notation falls horrendously short of representing music—that is with the exception of tones and some rhythm. If you never heard Stephane Grappelli play, your rendition wouldn’t match up much. Besides, what would be the point of putting into notation something Mr. Grappelli never had to read in the first place? If you can’t play it first by ear, then the notation serves only as a shortcut—a detour, actually—for you to develop your own musicianship.

Let’s look at this a different way: When you read a book, do you hear the author’s voice in your head? Is it different than my interpretation of the author’s voice? Do the letters and words actually convey all of the intention of the author?

Consider most elementary school bands and your experience of listening to them. Their intonation is not well developed to put it nicely. The children have been taught to play notes, push buttons and blow air. Does their rendition of the piece of music groove? Or does it sit lifelessly? I believe we have taught them to count the beats and not feel what’s in between—where the music really lives.

Some adults say of themselves that they are not musical, but then I hear them perform. “Wow, that was really moving and beautiful. How can you say you’re not musical?” They answer that they don’t know the notes (names of notes) or the theory (like how many verbs did you just read in the last paragraph), or, more often than not, they don’t know how to read the notation. To me, this is simply absurd. Listen to Erroll Garner ( http://bit.ly/ErrollGarner ), and tell me why he should need to read what he’s playing. The truth is that he doesn’t know how to read and write music. Yet, many fine jazz musicians call him a musical genius.

Now, this is not to say that reading notation—with understanding—is not valuable. We would not have symphony orchestras to play some of the world’s finest music. Many rock and jazz bands rely on written music. Most probably do not. When they do, the notation reminds them of what it is they can already audiate. They can “think the music” in their minds. If you can do that, then I say that you are musical—whether you can play, sing or read music or not! And think about this for a bit: Musical listeners are actually half of the equation. Otherwise, for whom are musicians performing?

09/04/2015

My take on all the research I've read is that there are indeed solid relationships between music and non-musical skills. The problem is establishing clear causality. All of these studies could be seen as a very promising reason for why to study music or play an instrument.

Unfortunately, the research is replete with flawed research design, misinterpretations of data, and exaggerated implications of research findings. Most important to me, and probably to many of you, is that music is worth it for it’s own sake. Many great musicians cannot read music or know theory. In improvisational music, parts of the prefrontal cortex actually are best shut down. There is also this anecdote about a 40-year-old man who cannot tie his shoes and is socially a 4-year-old, and yet, upon first hearing can immediately imitate a Fats Waller composition he’d never heard before from beginning to end. No social, math, language skills got developed there. The outliers may tell more truth than the middle 68%. (I’m a bit of a Gladwell fan, though still skeptical of some of his work.)

All that said, still, the preponderance of the evidence is moving in a positive direction toward illuminating benefits of music education. Having read much of this type of literature—many high level research studies by prestigious universities some published in respected peer reviewed journals—my belief is this:

People who have the innate nature to be musical—coupled with a rich interactive musical environment at the earliest stages in life—become musical. Period.

Then, later on, because of how music is taught (e.g., a whole note = 4, 1/8 note in cut time = 1/16, You have to be good in math or you won’t jump through that hoop!), or because music probably helped brain development in a variety of ways in early and late infancy (rich webs of synaptic connections grown across areas of the brain not otherwise stimulated), those connections are then there to be used in a multiplicity of ways that may make a difference in the development of a variety of non-musical skills. [Bad sentence, but not rewriting this now. Eesh.] Daniel Levitin makes a compelling case in This is Your Brain on Music, and A World in Six Songs. He is both thoughtful and imaginative. I’d like to think he’s right. He's also a good story teller but he didn't attribute some of his writings (where he should have) to the greatest researcher in music psychology, Dr. Edwin Gordon.

In the end, if we keep selling the value of music for the sake of the development of non-musical skills, we are selling ourselves out and doing a serious injustice to our profession in the long run, let alone to the children who have exceptionally high music aptitude and yet are low performing in many or most other subjects. Why is there no societal push to have studies that justify how learning Math helps English, or on how Science helps xxx? I find the current climate troublesome and to top it off, it is widely perpetuated by NAfME and the NAMM Foundation. NAMM's recent brochure does not include anything on how music education contributes to one’s ability to be musical. I find this completely out of whack.

Rant over. Here are some links to studies you might be able to use.

The last paragraph comes closest to my way of thinking. The 'Rasmussen' quoted in the last piece interestingly is NOT me. I just searched for it and found out it is me!! It's from forever ago. PBS got it from ???

Musical training has been shown to positively influence linguistic abilities. To follow the developmental dynamics of this transfer effect at the preattentive level, we conducted a longitudinal study over 2 school years with nonmusician children randomly assigned to music or to painting training. We recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN), a cortical correlate of preattentive mismatch detection, to syllables that differed in vowel frequency, vowel duration, and voice onset time (VOT), using a test-training-retest procedure and 3 times of testing: before training, after 6 months and after 12 months of training. While no between-group differences were found before training, enhanced preattentive processing of syllabic duration and VOT, as reflected by greater MMN amplitude, but not of frequency, was found after 12 months of training in the music group only. These results demonstrate neuroplasticity in the child brain and suggest that active musical training rather than innate predispositions for music yielded the improvements in musically trained children. These results also highlight the influence of musical training for duration perception in speech and for the development of phonological representations in normally developing children. They support the importance of music-based training programs for children's education and open new remediation strategies for children with language-based learning impairments.

- - - - -

Improved Test ScoresA study published in 2007 by Christopher Johnson, professor of music education and music therapy at the University of Kansas, revealed that students in elementary schools with superior music education programs scored around 22 percent higher in English and 20 percent higher in math scores on standardized tests, compared to schools with low-quality music programs, regardless of socioeconomic disparities among the schools or school districts. Johnson compares the concentration that music training requires to the focus needed to perform well on a standardized test.

Aside from test score results, Johnson’s study highlights the positive effects that a quality music education can have on a young child’s success. Luehrisen explains this psychological phenomenon in two sentences: “Schools that have rigorous programs and high-quality music and arts teachers probably have high-quality teachers in other areas. If you have an environment where there are a lot of people doing creative, smart, great things, joyful things, even people who aren’t doing that have a tendency to go up and do better.”

And it doesn’t end there: along with better performance results on concentration-based tasks, music training can help with basic memory recall. “Formal training in music is also associated with other cognitive strengths such as verbal recall proficiency,” Pruett says. “People who have had formal musical training tend to be pretty good at remembering verbal information stored in memory.”

Being MusicalMusic can improve your child’ abilities in learning and other nonmusic tasks, but it’s important to understand that music does not make one smarter. As Pruett explains, the many intrinsic benefits to music education include being disciplined, learning a skill, being part of the music world, managing performance, being part of something you can be proud of, and even struggling with a less than perfect teacher.

“It’s important not to oversell how smart music can make you,” Pruett says. “Music makes your kid interesting and happy, and smart will come later. It enriches his or her appetite for things that bring you pleasure and for the friends you meet.”While parents may hope that enrolling their child in a music program will make her a better student, the primary reasons to provide your child with a musical education should be to help them become more musical, to appreciate all aspects of music, and to respect the process of learning an instrument or learning to sing, which is valuable on its own merit.

“There is a massive benefit from being musical that we don’t understand, but it’s individual. Music is for music’s sake,” Rasmussen [NOT ME, Oh, it IS ME!! from forever ago. PBS, where did you get my quote??] says. “The benefit of music education for me is about being musical. It gives you have a better understanding of yourself. The horizons are higher when you are involved in music,” he adds. “Your understanding of art and the world, and how you can think and express yourself, are enhanced.”

Question: What does a child gain from learning the above lessons before he or she can learn to speak? Nothing! Zero! Zip! Nada!

Subject: Music

So, take a look at this picture of a well-known learning site and think about how you’d learn this if you hadn't already learned to perform scores of songs and learned to improvise (just like we do in language by 2 or 3 years old)?

What would you learn?

Nothing! Zero! Zip! Nada! Scratch! Donut hole! A vast black hole of nothing musical at all. Just information. So, can I ask that music educators please stop teaching music this way until children’s EARS are “literate”, and their MOUTHS are musically rhythmic and tuneful. All the rest (that is, the stuff in this picture) is completely wasted information until that point.

Can you hear me? I hope you’re not reading letters here, but rather seeing patterns of letters called words. And, those words create meaning as they’re placed together in a way that hopefully has thinking occur at some level. Am I mad? Yes. Probably both kinds.

Send feedback. I want to know what you think. And, please check out some of my other posts here and elsewhere.

08/19/2014

These comments are common and very encouraging. But, it’s short of what we need. I’ve been reassessing our IndieGoGo campaign to date and at some point, we knew we needed help. So, we got some.

My partner and I just got off the phone with an entrepreneur and business coach* who was very generous of her time and talent. What great advice she gave us! *(Cool lady and one of her clients is Johnson and Johnson.)

First, she GETS it. She really loves, loves, loves our idea and so much about what we’re doing. She says our app we’re developing has so many positives—reaching children all over the world, that they can learn substantive music content and skills while playing an engaging game. “Moms will love this,” she said. She says we have amazing credibility and a fabulous idea.

What’s missing? Our message isn’t working quite like it needs, or it’s not getting out there to enough people—folks like our new coach who really gets it. Also, we absolutely need a finished prototype that would make it easier for people to understand what this app will actually do, so it will be easier to understand, get feed back, and gain traction. Ideas are easy. What’s hard is getting them into people’s hands and reiterating until we have it the way it needs to be done right. We’re bootstrapping this, making our dollars stretch far, but we are asking for your support. Give us your feedback and/or money. And please share with your communities. They may “get it” and help us create a more musical world together.

Click here if you haven't seen what we're up to: IndieGoGo campaign We appreciate you taking a look.

08/04/2014

First, take a banana. Open up and smell it. Is it green, or over ripe, or somewhere in between? You "know" with your nose. You detect the smell and then compare that smell with other bananas you've smelled in the past. You can do the same with your eyes. You compare what you have seen in the past with the banana you have in your hand. The patterns that make you discern edible from inedible are automatically stored in your brain from previous experiences. Are you seeing the WHOLE banana? Probably not very much of it at all. You likely focus immediately on the badly bruised spots or the string hanging off of it. You're not taking in every cell. That's too much to comprehend. You detect the important patterns. Almost without thinking. That's very cool when you think about it. Ok, enough with the bananas and on to music.

Music. When you listen to music, are you hearing every note? Hearing? Maybe. That's physical. The sound IS hitting your ear—your cochlea is transmitting it through the auditory nerve to the auditory cortext and some other things between the air (on which the sound travels) and your brain. Are you understanding every note? Almost impossible. You are comparing the patterns you are hearing (of tones and rhythms among other elements) with patterns you've heard in the past. Or in the case of reading language, 你是在比較你所看到的你已經看到在過去的模式的模式。Maybe you need that translated: You are comparing the patterns you are seeing with patterns you've seen in the past. You are NOT reading letters. You comprehend your language based on the patterns of letters you recognize as words. . . that carry meaning, but we must add one more thing—context. Context is decisive. It makes all the difference. If I said "to," or "two," or "too," or "tu" (fr.), which one would you hear? It depends completely on the context. Patterns and context are crucial in language and so they are in music.

Not letters, patterns! I've harped on this before but music educators teach note names (analogous to letters in language) often before we've taught patterns, or words. It's akin to teaching the alphabet to a child who cannot speak his own language yet. What does a 'K' mean? Nothing. In music, what does an 'A' mean? Nothing. Unless it's inside a pattern, say 'F A C,' but 'F A C' is still incomplete. There is no context—unless you gave it one yourself. So, I'm going to tell you that 'F A C' is the IV chord in C major. Now it has everything you need to understand it.

Music understanding is rooted in lots of songs and chants and movement and dance, but MUST eventually move to the understanding of patterns. How they are the same. How they are different. How the same patterns can sound in different contexts. The importance of patterns is hard to overstate. It happens to be how you can even read what I'm writing. Also, how you can recognize a loved one walking down the street. And of course, whether or not you should eat that banana.

Your brain is hard wired to make patterns in order to understand the world. Music must have as one of its cornerstones the teaching of tonal and rhythm patterns. Otherwise, we leave music understanding only to those who have high enough degree of innate ability that they can do it for themselves. I prefer another world where it's possible that all of us have access to understanding music—through patterns.

The Pitch (the sales kind, not the note). So, why not an app that teaches and scores you on your ability to hear and reproduce many of the most important patterns in music? There's no reason, except that its development needs to be funded. Would you consider helping us? Any amount is welcome. $5 even.

Visit this campaign and see what we're up to. See the videos of what kids can do when they are taught to understand music through the teaching of patterns. It's quite amazing. Perks are available. Get on the ground floor of what could be a revolutionizing supplement to music education. Click here: http://igg.me/at/teachmusictokids.

09/27/2013

The key to the *musical* success of any program would be to start early—VERY early—but not necessarily with instruments. At the upper elementary, MS and HS levels, my point is almost moot. At younger levels, consider that early music childhood experiences provides for children the crucial readiness for long-term success in music. Starting younger than 4 or 5 is HIGHLY recommended when possible. Bear in mind that children at this age, analogous to children who are in a "language babble" stage, do not need to know any theory, note names, durations, or lines and spaces—just as a very young child is not aware of grammar and punctuation. Still, the immersion and participation in his or her language—or in this case, music—is mission critical to make the most of a child's innate potential for musical achievement. From those listening experiences sprout a performing vocabulary (singing/chanting/playing). Then, teachers would be better off emphasizing improvisation and creativity before introducing the musical "grammar." The emphasis on reading and writing can come later—again, just as it does in language development. Eventually, we all should learn the alphabet to be "literate," but the fact that we share the alphabet with so many latin-derived languages, does not make us able to take any meaning from them. Who here knows Croation? (We share their alphabet of course.)

I'll boldly tell you that many of the top children in your programs who are excelling musically are doing so in large part based upon the early music experiences they had at home or elsewhere during the formative first two or three years of life, including the last trimester in utero as well. Brain development starts to slow down dramatically after 4 and 5 years old. After that, a child's brain is still fairly malleable, but without building a strong neural foundation early, everything else becomes much more difficult later. Of course, like me, a strong intrinsic motivation factors in strongly as not everyone has the best nature-nurture combination in those early years and yet still thrives in music somehow. Hard work, eh hem, I mean hard play!

07/19/2013

IMPORTANT LEGISLATIVE NEWS FROM NAfME:
Today, after two days of debate, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the new GOP ESEA bill, H.R. 5, the "Student Success Act," by a partisan vote of 221-207. NAfME's Insert Linkown Shannon Kelly has been following all of the proceedings this week. The legislation seeks to drastically cut down on the "federal footprint" for education policy, striking down many key provisions of No Child Left Behind and also eliminating several signature education programs introduced by the Obama administration.
Under the new law, states and school districts would gain a tremendous amount of control as to how they hold schools accountable for the progress of students. Amendments adopted during debate on Thursday included one that eliminates the requirement that states evaluate teachers based on student outcomes; under the amendment these evaluations would now be optional. The legislation also prevents the Department of Education from adopting the Common Core State Standards, and eliminates Maintenance of Effort (i.e. spending) requirements for states in order to receive federal funding. Finally, the legislation adjusts Title I funding allocation requirements; effectively allowing states and LEAs to allocate funding to any schools with students below the poverty level regardless of the number or concentration of children in poverty.
This is the first time since 2001 that an education bill has reached the floor of either house of Congress. However, passage in the House is almost certainly as far as the bill will go—the Senate HELP Committee has forwarded a diametrically opposed version of ESEA for consideration by the full body, and the White House has also publicly stated its opposition to the House bill.
Most importantly for music advocates, H.R.5 spells bad news for any federal support of music education. Ranking Member George Miller introduced a substitute bill that would have done more for arts education, but it never had any realistic chance of passing. In his remarks on the floor, Mr. Miller stated, “They fail to provide adequate funding and resources for students and schools. They fail to move beyond the narrow focus of reading and math to ensure students get a well-rounded education.” The amendment was soundly defeated by a partisan vote of 193-233.
What happens next is in the hands of the Senate. Chairman Harkin has stated that he hopes his bill will reach the Senate floor by early fall. We will be active with the Chairman’s office (a key supporter of music education) in the days and weeks to come. Stay tuned for more soon on the Harkin approach to protecting music and arts education, and the work that is currently taking place throughout the greater arts education community, in preparation for the next round of lobbying efforts.

Music lesson Plan "Naming Notes" worksheets "If they can't name notes then they can't build scales and chords" #musedgoo.gl/UxBbx

[Seeing this tweet prompted me to respond right away—essentially because I hold off teaching theory—such as lines/spaces and durations (quarter/half/whole, etc.)—until I can’t go any further without it. Which is pretty far. Dare I say, sometimes further than many music teachers can go musically. I know I’m a heretic.]